Where did the "juices" in "creative juices" come from? Isn't that just a little weird? I don't think juices would be the first word to mind, if I hadn't heard the phrase before, and was free-associating metaphors to go with creative. Is it a reference to the Aristotelean humors, maybe? That seems a bit far-fetched. Or perhaps some really cool person coined the phrase and it stuck? Anyway, I'd just appreciate anyone giving me a plausible pathway on how it came to be a "stock phrase."
Learn English – Where did the “juices” in “creative juices” come from
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"To bite the dust" means to die or to fail (see e.g. Wiktionary). Picture someone falling down, wounded or dead, quite literally biting the dust (soil, ground, earth). Etymonline says that the first recorded appearance of the phrase is from 1750. The Phrase Finder supplies it as follows:
The earliest citation of the 'bite the dust' version [of the earlier phrase 'lick the dust', from the Bible] is from 1750 by the Scottish author Tobias Smollett , in his Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane:
"We made two of them bite the dust, and the others betake themselves to flight."
[...]
[Samuel Butler's 19th century translation of Homer's The Iliad] contains a reference to 'bite the dust' in these lines:
"Grant that my sword may pierce the shirt of Hector about his heart, and that full many of his comrades may bite the dust as they fall dying round him."
Whether that can be counted as an 8th century BC origin for 'bite the dust' is open to question and some would say that it was Butler's use of the phrase rather than Homer's.
From Etymonline:
doggone 1851, Amer.Eng., a "fantastic perversion of god-damned" [Weekley]. But Mencken favors the theory that it is "a blend form of dog on it; in fact it is still often used with it following. It is thus a brother to the old English phrase, 'a pox upon it,' but is considerably more decorous."
Others have it derived from the Scottish dagone, or "gone to the dogs," but there's a bit of debate about that.
From my own search, I found several pre-1851 uses. It looks like it may have first appeared in print in a British publication, albeit of an American vernacular dialog, in Adventures in Mexico and the Rocky Mountains by British explorer George Ruxton, 1847 (date check):
It subsequently appeard three times in 1848 in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, in articles written by Ruxton while living in America.
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Best Answer
An Ngram of the term shows its birth as a "stock phrase" only dates back to the 1960s, but the words are found in print a century earlier and the first examples of the phrase being used to mean motivating, inspiring, or enabling forces or factors go back to the 1930s. I'll give you one example of each.
I found creative juices in print back to this 1846 translation (p. 182, scroll down) of Kalevala, a Finnish epic poem that recounts a mythical story of the cursed birth of steel:
I don't think this reference is incidental. The same section of this poem, with the same translation, was reprinted several times in the writings of Lafcadio Hearn at the turn of the century and as late as 1922. While not the figurative use of the phrase we have today, I think there's a good chance its occurrence in his writings led to its familiarity and adaptation in the 1930s.
The first use of it I could find in print with its modern connotation was from this 1936 article in The Delineator:
I wasn't able to get a more complete quote because of the limitations of Google's Snippet view, but it's clear the article is referring to the figurative creative juices of musicians.
One later 1930s reference of note is found in the intro to the 1939 screenplay of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind.